urbancontxt

CITY LIMITS.THIS IS WHERE THE CITY ENDS.

Matilde Igual Capdevila

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1. One of the posters used to show the way to the outer limits.

2. Series of photographs documenting the straight walk, from the center to the highway in the southern part of the city.

The basic idea of the project comes from a urban accident. Sometime ago I noticed one of the streets in my neighbourhood had no end, it ended where the city did, the perspective was clean and no building interfered. This means I could actually see a blank space at the end of the street and watching carefully (or maybe imagining) the horizon line.

In most cities that wouldn’t have been impressive at all, but Valencia´s urban fabric is complex and has suffered a great number of variations, it’s not the result of a single plan but rather a mix of contradictory plans, informal growth and former independent villages. So, in that area (which includes historicall neighborhoods) this is the only street that

goes straight from the center (Calle Colón) to the outskirts, to the end of the city.

Another particularity of the city: its (almost) complete flatness makes disorientation very easy, it’s hard to comprehend its size, you’d need to get to the top of some tower or tall building to be able to look at its limits. From inside, Valencia could be unlimited and eternal, giving an opressive feeling, like if there were no way out, no evidence of the external.

On another plan, there’s something particular in straight ahead walks, like standing on a moving walkway, the surroundings just scroll and keep on changing while the direction remains the same. The walker is tracing a section through the city 2

and is able to perceive the urban layers in their whole complexity.

The size of the buildings varies, its style, the street section changes abruptly, the pedestrians flux is different from the commercial and business center to the residential areas and the yet to be build outskirts, from the early century bourgeois appartment buildings to the social housing, and the hotels and motorway and finally: the countryside.

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MAPPING WITH MEMORIES.

Matilde Igual Capdevila

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     

  

  

                                   

An attempt at mapping a well known teritory from a very subjective point of view.

The riverbed is a too familiar place to try to understand it as pure space, or to analyze coldly its inhabitants, as it's always hard to be both the observer and the observed.

1. Full map version 2. Detail 3. Guy Debord's Mémoires 1957 ARTE, ARQUITECTURA Y CONTEXTO URBANO

SUSAN SONTAG: THE HEROISM OF VISION (IN "ON PHOTOGRAPHY") Matilde Igual Capdevila

BEAUTY VS TRUTH

PAINTING VS PHOTOGRAPHY

ABSTRACTION IN PHOTOGRAPHY

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THE QUEST

LENIENT FASHION

HABITS OF SEEING

IMPERFECTION

DISORDER

HARSH

CRUEL 1. Stieglitz 1893 “Fifth Avenue, Winter” 2. Cartier- Bresson 3. Richard Avedon 4. Ansel Adams 5. Andreas Feininger 6. Cartier- Bresson 7. Jacob Riis 8. Robert Frank 9. Nan Goldin 10. Lerski ARTE, ARQUITECTURA Y CONTEXTO URBANO

CITY LIMITS.THIS IS WHERE THE CITY ENDS.

The first idea came up from a simple observation while walking around the central area of the river park.

In this part, one of the first ones to be designed, every function envisaged has its space, its closed, “gated” space. There are places to practice sports, places for temporary events, a cafeteria surrounded by bushes, a cycling path, several pedestrian ways and a playground; all of them strictly kept appart from the others.

The most striking aspect was, for us, the playground case, completely surrounded by bushes, and border creating urban furniture elements, the place devoted to children is basically nothing but a big sandbox with three identical rope pyramids as only attraction. This is surprising as, given the few parks existing in Valencia, and hence the lack of opportunities for urban kids to spend time outdoors, one would think the biggest and most central green area in town could be used as a place for them to play

without the many restrictions they are imposed everywhere else, primarly because of the danger generated by the car presence.

The river urban planning (at least this part’s) reproduces excatly the same patterns of closed space after another as everywhere else in the city, with a severity that is hard to understand in a large park.

From this very easy and basic perceptive idea, we thought our art project should try to resolve this problem. We would break the inner limits of the river, to create, not a homogenous space (as that would be as unnatural as the current situation) but a connexion between areas and functions and social groups.

For instance, and this is just a very practical example, the playgroung area is separated from the nearest cafeteria by several bush borders, a pedestrian way and a walking path; it is impossible to see what’s going on in any of these two areas from

Matilde Igual Capdevila

the paths, or from one to another.

Parents taking care of their kids (and any other care taker) can’t have a coffee while controlling the children.

Or if one of the children wants an icecream, he can’t buy one by himself, even if both areas are very close, because the visibility is completely interrupted.

To a larger scale, and much more theoretical approach, we realized that there’s a constant lack of freedom coming from the way cities are planned, public space tends to be incerdibly fragmented and organized in an unflexible way, there’s no a fluid connection between zones and every activity is enclosed in its own ghetto.

Living under these conditions can prove to be very alienating.

T h a t ’s h o w w e r e a l i z e d o u r intervention should be something that could expand and spread into the city, connecting every bit turning it all into a multifunctional area, and enhancing the main quality of

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public space: everything can happen, everyone is invited (as an opposition to private space and its restictions).

Back to the starting point, what we propose is to use and subvert the existing element in the playground: the piramyds. Prolonging the ropes outside the delimited area, the other spaces would be transformed into a playground and its festive ideals would conquer everything.

For the real intevention we invested into the cheapest materials available

yet of similar aspect to the ropes used in the piramyds: thin red rope, the resistant element, and larger paper red ribbons, not resistant but cheaper and much more visible. It seemed important to us that our intervention merge with the existing structure in order to make our statement easier to understand by people.

On the first takes we connected the piramyds to the Calatrava’s bridge and to the outer part of the river (the Alameda), sadly the amount of tape available didn’t allowed the structure to be dense enough to be understood (or visible).

We soon realized (albeit, not soon

enough probably, as by then we had already tried a couple of times) that a bigger intervention like the one we planned at the beginning would require thousands of meters of rope.

We focused then on the areas closer to the playground.

And repeated the installation several times in order to improve it, which also allowed us to observe different kinds of interaction. The one we mostly expected was the kids playing with our installation and inventing new games out of it. Some teenagers

then asked us to let them use the ropes as elements for their parkour* practice. We expected having negative feedback from the children care takers, as nets of ropes can prove to be slightly dangerous, but they were rather happy as they think the existing games available for the kids (the piramyds) are very limited, dangerous for the younger and in the end, a little boring, giving the kids very narrow options and few space for imagination.

* Parkour or l’art du déplacement.

Is where participants jump, vault, and climb over obstacles in a fluid manner.

It is a non-competitive way to move fluidly despite ones environment. The object of parkour is to get from one place to another using only the human body and the objects in the environment.

The obstacles can be anything in one’s environment, but parkour is often seen practiced in urban areas. A recent convention of parkour philosophy has been the idea of “human reclamation”.

The founder of parkou movement, David Belle said : “the whole town was there for us; there for parkour. You just have to look, you just have to think, like children.”

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